Ever have one of those perplexing conversations with a white person where they are positive that racism is over and you’re pretty sure they’re insane? Well, a recent poll shows that whites and blacks continue to have very different opinions on what is actually going on in this country, as shown by their confidence in police officers:
An NBC News/Marist College poll released Sunday found 52 percent of whites saying they have a “great deal” of confidence that police officers in their community treat blacks and whites equally. That is 11 points higher than in a September NBC/Wall Street Journal poll asking the same question (albeit using a different polling firm). … There’s been no such boon in confidence among African Americans, though. Just 12 percent express a great deal of confidence in local police’s equal treatment of blacks and whites — a number that is squarely within the 10-to-17-point range in previous surveys. Only one-third have at least a “fair amount” of confidence in their neighborhood police, compared with 78 percent of whites.
It’s hard to believe that change can happen if people in this country refuse to see the literal discrepancies between black and white right in front of them.
Team Blackness discussed more details of the Berkeley protests and a very revealing conversation with Elon and his father–a man he hasn’t spoken to in 27 years.
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Ripley
That pretty much describes my family holiday gatherings. Which is why I’m going to Las Vegas this year instead.
Thanks for your perspective on this blog – much needed.
Patricia Kayden
It’s easy to be positive about the police if you’re not their target.
skerry
I don’t recommend listening to this while you are in a place that you don’t want to cry. I found it heartbreaking. Very raw.
Mike in dc
Wow. I hope that Elon is able to forge some kind of connection with his dad. I was estranged from mine for years. I think I took a long time to forgive him and just take him where he’s at.
Also, for some of my fellow white folks to continue to insist racism is dead is either willful ignorance or just plain trolling at this point.
Lavocat
I’m as white as this page an I KNOW racism is alive and festering. I see it every day, especially in the daily stories of my clients.
Post-racial society my ass!
rikyrah
Because, of course, the lives we lead aren’t valid. Our experiences aren’t true because the truth would rattle the security and safety of too many White people. There’s always gotta be a REASON for what we say other than what we say.
rikyrah
Unequal Treatment of 2 Protesters in Eric Garner Case, One White and One Black
DEC. 9, 2014
excerpt:
Two of those were Shawn Torres, 23, and Benjamin Perry, 24, both graduate students at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan. They took part in rolling demonstrations Friday night, as a cold, soaking rain swept across the city. At the end of the evening, they briefly blockaded the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive near Delancey Street and both were arrested, as they expected to be.
But Mr. Perry, a white man, and Mr. Torres, a black man, say what happened to them showed disparate treatment in subtle and stark ways. The president of the seminary has written to Mayor Bill de Blasio to suggest that the experiences of the students were “an object lesson” for retraining officers; the Police Department said it would have to review the details of the matter.
Standing on the road with arms linked just after 11 p.m., they heard a police sergeant’s final warning but had already decided they would disobey.
“We were peacefully offering ourselves up,” Mr. Perry said.
“Two officers grabbed me,” Mr. Torres said, and cuffed him with the plastic ties. “In the process, one of them ended up pushing Ben away. This is when the difference comes in.”
“I put my hands behind my head, waiting,” Mr. Perry said. “Another officer grabbed me and threw me face first on the ground. He put his head next to my ears and whispered, ‘Just get out of here.’ ”
Mr. Torres, meanwhile, had been deposited in the back of a police van. “I was the first one,” he said.
Mr. Perry climbed to his feet. “I was bewildered, but I wasn’t going to leave Shawn,” he said. “I just stood there and waited. In 15 to 20 seconds, another officer saw me looking around. He cuffed me, but he didn’t want to process me. He took me around to other cops, saying, ‘Do you want to take this guy? I don’t want to be out that late.’ He was shopping me around.” Eventually he found an officer to escort Mr. Perry
They were driven to Police Headquarters, where their belts and shoelaces were confiscated. Several buttons with pins were removed from Mr. Torres’s clothing — “the officer told me they were weapons,” he said — but identical ones were left on his white schoolmate. Mr. Perry insisted on making a phone call, but the phone was dead. He was able to prevail on his arresting officer to contact a hotline at the seminary for the protests.
Not so for Mr. Torres. “I asked my arresting officer three times to make a call for me, but he would not,” Mr. Torres said. The pen was a racially mixed group of about 20 people. According to both men, the officer overseeing them, a black man, got into a debate with the demonstrators, saying that their beef was with the judicial system, not the police, and that they ought to be protesting black-on-black crime. The officer, they said, acknowledged that an indictment might have been brought in a borough other than Staten Island, one not so friendly to the police.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/nyregion/unequal-treatment-of-2-protesters-in-eric-garner-case-one-white-and-one-black.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=1
the Conster
For whites to acknowledge racism is to acknowledge that maybe you didn’t get what you have with just bootstraps and the sweat of your brow, with no help from anyone thank you very much, and why can’t “those people” do what I did, which they could if they weren’t so damn lazy. It probably will take a long time to show up in polling, but I really do think that the conversations black people have always had are starting to be heard, even if just a little, and once it’s seen how the system works in favor of whites, it can’t be unseen, only denied. White eyes are being pried open.
Our local talk show here in Boston last night had a white Jewish judge on discussing this issue, and how he’s been aware of racial injustice for years. He was passionate about the issue, so, talk is a beginning.
SatanicPanic
@rikyrah: I’ve tried to be on guard against this in my own life, but sometimes I mess up because how do people who aren’t black know? If I’ve learned anything from reading history in the last couple years it’s that black people have an experience in America that’s far outside of what even Latinos or Asians have had to deal with. Some of it sounds downright far-fetched until you have someone actually break it down for you (or until you read history- which I try to do, because I know from experience of living in Japan that being cultural ambassador gets tiring so I try not to bug black friends, acquaintances, etc. with stupid questions). I’m not trying to excuse anything, just giving my perspective.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
I’d be curious to see if there’s a divide between urban and suburban whites. I sure as hell don’t trust LAPD or any of the other local police agencies, but a white person in, say, Santa Clarita might feel differently.
scav
Oh those little white lies they keep telling themselves are awesome!
ET
As a 40-something white female that hits low on the threat meter, I count myself with those who don’t have confidence in the police. I have no personal experience to base that lack of confidence on other than observation. But I am honestly ambivalent and what has been going on the past couple of months increased that feeling.
If someone like me is ambivalent, then police really do have a problem. Not a perception problem but a reality problem.
gelfling545
Much depends, as usual, on how the question is interpreted. If I am asked about how much confidence I have in the police in dealing with me (an old, white lady) then I’m pretty confident. If I’m asked if I have confidence that they will treat all members of the community with fairness & justice, then no confidence at all. Still I’m guessing that numbers of those among the white population who express confidence will creep down as what has been done with impunity in the Black community spreads, as it surely will. It takes time for some to realize that injustice to one leads to injustice to all so some won’t notice until their particular ox is gored.
Cacti
When Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, white people said “well, there weren’t any witnesses”.
When Wilson killed Michael Brown, white people said “well, the witnesses weren’t believable”.
I wonder what they’ll say to the video of Loehmann jumping out of a police cruiser and shooting Tamir Rice in the chest 2 seconds later, after they let him off the hook.
Another Holocene Human
@rikyrah: Maybe Brother West could redeem himself a bit by using his media position to talk about what happened to these Union students.
I found that story about the supervising officer at the pen kind of amusing, he must be the brother from another mother of some of my coworkers, only bad thing is it’s not some kitchen table debate because he’s a cop and they’re in the pen but it sounds like he was willing to listen.
aimai
@rikyrah: Holy shit. I mean, not that I’m surprised at all but still, holy shit.
aimai
@Cacti: They will say “it happened so fast! It was an honest mistake!”
Another Holocene Human
@Cacti: From what I’ve seen, excuse it as “Cleveland” after all this is where Castro had three girls imprisoned for years in a crowded neighborhood. And where Anthony Sowell was killing dozens of women and burying them in his backyard and the cops never found him until one of his victims escaped.
We don’t have to worry about it because Cleveland has no cop hiring standards and no cop performance standards.
Another Holocene Human
Actually both cases show that who the victim is matters, they did not give a shit about missing young Latina and Black women, especially “known prostitutes”.
SatanicPanic
@Cacti: “tragic, but doesn’t prove anything”
Another Holocene Human
@the Conster:
This hasn’t happened since the 60s. This has needed to happen for decades. Maybe it’s the perfect storm of a generation of youth in a lower crime rate who can’t be controlled by ‘fear of crime’, a young generation who watched an economy crash and don’t blindly trust the powers that be, a strident right wing who think that the gloves are off and they can do anything and say anything and aren’t afraid of the pushback, and the emergence of social media on the cell phone, democratizing the media and blowing up the corporate controlled media oligopoly that obtained for too long.
When I got into this fight some older African American brothers and sisters said they hadn’t seen times like these since the 60s. That’s not a good thing, but what is happening now is a necessary thing. Now is the time we must engage in struggle.
Cacti
OT but worth a mention…
Sen. Udall of Colorado appears to be exiting the Senate with a flourish.
Takes to the floor and discloses classified info from the 2011 Panetta Report, to prove that the CIA is still lying about the scope and extent of its torture program in its public comments.
What a shame to see him go.
Fortunately, he’s immune from any criminal charges, because of the Speech or Debate clause in Article I of the constitution.
mzrad
We just watched _The Loving Story_ again last night on Netflix. I hope the high point of our country confronting our own racism didn’t happen over 50 years ago. I had forgotten that Chief Justice Warren and the court produced a 9-0 decision on that case.
MomSense
The polling on confidence in police is depressing.
@Elon James White I give a shit about you! I don’t comment as much as I would like because by the time I can actually listen to the broadcast, the threads are usually dead. This afternoon I was able to catch the first 15 minutes and will listen to the rest tonight.
JaneE
It gets worse than that. Around here some people are convinced that whites are the ones being discriminated against and that minorities get extra benefits for being black or Hispanic. And they point to the free health care for Native Americans as evidence of that. Never mind that black and Hispanic are not Native American, and the “benefits” for Natives are based on long standing treaty obligations. Or the ongoing theft of moneys held in trust by the government. But they are not racists because complaining about the “extra benefits” given to blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans is just talking about how unfair it is for all “those people” to get more than whites. Not a one has any idea how poor you need to be to get those benefits. Or how difficult it is to find a job that pays enough to be above the benefit threshold. Or how many of the people getting benefits are actually white. They seem to think that because they lived comfortably when they were making 10K/year (50 or 60 years ago) that people today should be able to do the same.
the Conster
@Another Holocene Human:
I think the difference now is social media, which has truly done a great service and without which these events would never get more than local traction. We get to see these things in real time, unfiltered. We can talk to each other now without gatekeepers, who keep trying to tell us to believe them and not our lying eyes, and we can share our outrage with unknown others instead of screaming in our own living rooms.
Susan K of the tech support
I just listened to that show and your interaction with your father. I salute and honor the way you handled that conversation. So wrenching. I’m highly sympathetic to the comments that he wanted to make this connection for him more than for you. Please do what you need to take care of yourself. Sending you a ton of support via a blog comment.
(wait, whut? I just realized that the show began with “Don’t read the comments.” and yet here we are….)
Visceral
@the Conster:
I think that most people get that what kind of life you live has a lot more to do with the genetic lottery than with anything else. However, the obvious follow-up question is “What do white people have that, if we had true equality, they would not have?”, with the implication that they should give those things to black people. Racial politics is so vulgar and hysterical that when you talk about “equality” and “social justice”, you have to realize that white people are imagining teams of hippies and representatives of the NAACP or La Raza going door to door, writing down what white people make and own, and deciding what needs to be confiscated and redistributed and who needs to be fired and replaced with a minority to make the races equal. A noble ideal that even most white people can get on board with quickly gets turned into something immediately and tangibly threatening when they sit down and think about what it’s actually going to take.